Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect—you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.

They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically when they read ... Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.

One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn.